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• ancient and venerable feelings swept away
• traditions melting away
• holiness profaned
• new wants constantly created
• work made charmless, monotonous, hateful, embittering

• workers slaves of machines and the factory system.

If we think back to last term, it is extraordinarily reminiscent of Victorian escapism,
th
exemplified by the views of people such as the influential art critic, John Ruskin. 19
century Britain was the first country to experience the industrial revolution, and it
provoked a massive backlash. Many expressed hatred for the squalor and ugliness of
the industrial towns, the soul-destroying nature of factory work, and the values of

excessive competition, calculation and greed. These sentiments were very widely
shared and as we saw resulted in Victorian escapism, into the past (the novels of Sir
Walter Scott and Pugin’s Gothic revival). or into a rural utopia (the idea of England as
a garden, William Morris’s News From Nowhere, Howard’s Garden Cities and Octavia
Hill’s National Trust).

In terms of our current theme, the conversation between the Enlightenment and
Romanticism, we should see Victorian escapism as essentially a weak form of

Romanticism. Not weak as feeble or inferior; as Duncan Heath says, Romanticism
revolutionised British culture too, but, in a much quieter way. We could say that in
Europe, Romanticism was loud and full-on: Sturm Und Drang*; in Britain it was quiet
and escapist; England as a garden. Both Shelley and Byron fled to Italy.

*”Storm and Stress”, the title of a play by Klinger, a protégé of Goethe.

Nonetheless it is clear from the above passages that the language of Marx’s critique
of capitalism in the Communist Manifesto closely mirrors that of the Victorian
escapists. But it has even more surprising passages:

“A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism. All the powers of old
Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar,

Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.”
“Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of
property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of
exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the
nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”

“All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of
minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of